Slot Machine Or Treasure Hunt?

The smartphone as a simulacrum of urbanism

I’ve seen smartphones, often in the context of social media referred to in the following ways: magic glass, anxiety slabs, slot machines. I like them all, but the last one probably gets at the reality the best.

That is from this interesting piece from a Substack called Startup Parent, by Sarah Peck:

At night, the loneliness inside all of us conspires to bring us to our tiny slot machines, those little window boxes of Internet access. Whether it’s the phone or the pad or the wall screen, we scroll through TikTok and Instagram and Messages trying to find the closeness we crave. What we want is so powerful: we want laughter and connection and human touch and art and magic.

But what we get from tiny screens is not enough.

The piece isn’t mainly about smartphones or social media. But what a good way to think about what these apps are doing. The largely random but slightly skilled element to virality in particular.

Of course the screens are not enough. This makes me wonder whether the notion that the smartphone and the phenomenon of always being connected has eaten away at real community isn’t quite right. Maybe this screen addiction is largely downstream of community having already been greatly diminished. Bowling Alone, for example, was published in 2000, based on a 1995 essay. There were plenty of middle-class American homes that didn’t have a computer, let alone high-speed internet, in those days.

The idea that the behavior we call screen addiction, or whatever term you opt for, is a kind of maladaptive behavior to deal with social loneliness sounds pretty plausible.

But what that essay is really about is the need for more than just your family and your close friends. She describes it this way:

We’re not meant to carry all of this burden in siloed houses so far apart from each other. The nuclear family is too small. But we can begin to drown inside of it, and forget that all of these fights—the fights over the cooking and the cleaning and the work and the children—are really about something else entirely.

Kurt Vonnegut, an American writer, humorist, and the author of fourteen books, speaks to the depth of loneliness that so many people feel and why we’re really fighting with each other. In the essay collection “If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?” Vonnegut shares sharp, precise notes on why it’s too much—and what we can do about it.

What we’re really fighting about, he argues, is that we don’t have enough people….

One person cannot be everything and everyone for another person. Our partner cannot be our therapist and our confidante and our bowling pal and our reading group and our cooking group. It’s impossible to be all of this to each other.

A marriage is not enough. A friend is not enough.

We need more people.

Urbanists like to talk about the sociological ideas of third places and weak ties. Third places are spaces that are not home or work—in America they’re generally commercial, but they don’t have to be—where you can just sort of exist around other people and be social or keep to yourself. (The typical example is sitting in a coffee shop where a bunch of people hang out, remote work, etc.) Weak ties are all the people you run into, exchange pleasantries with, see once a month. The people who sort of give human interest to your life and fill in space between your heavy relationships. The idea being that a big part of human happiness is just sort of being in the middle of things. It’s not that close friends and a romantic partner aren’t enough, per se; it’s that those weak ties and that general proximity to people is another thing entirely. There’s no ratio for how many strong ties make up for so many weak ties.

Now I think it’s impossible to really talk about any of this without talking about the built environment.